I don't mind that I picked a pretty normie name when I changed mine. I have all the respect in the world for trans people who decide their name is just a random noun now, but I don't think that'd have been the right choice for me. Mostly because I really like my chosen name and slightly because explaining a weird name in everyday contexts sounds like a pain.

Nevertheless. Given the number of times I've been added to the wrong group chat or email chain or whatever at work when they actually meant someone else with my same first name and similar surname, I do occasionally observe there would have been some advantage to picking a slightly more unusual name.

The best and also worst thing about my habit of double, triple, quadruple, etc checking certain things is that every once in a while the nth time I check things I notice that in fact I did miss something all the n-1 times I did so previously, which I guess objectively is good news in that it's better to catch mistakes than not but also means I can't really argue with my anxiety that "oh my gods shutup it'll be fine" because my brain will of course remind me "hey, remember when you realised you were late for an important exam despite checking the time multiple times and being convinced it'd be two hours later? and you immediately rushed to the place and they let you take it but they definitely wouldn't have if you had been two hours late? anyway better check again you set the correct parameters on that job before pressing run"

(the parameters were fine, by the way. but then a couple hours later i realised I'd set a calendar reminder to just before midnight tomorrow rather than just before midnight today and yeah I probably would've caught that but are you sure)

Sigh

My desktop computer spontaneously shut down and refuses to turn back on. There's nothing obviously wrong* and afaict it's not the power supply itself failing (things connected by USB to the computer can still draw power), which suggests that whatever is the problem will be expensive to replace. Still have a few things to try before giving up and considering replacement parts but my hopes are not up. Everything important is backed up, at least.

I guess I meant to upgrade it at some point and I can consider this an excuse to do so?

*well, obvious to me, at any rate

I am very much enjoying the fact that my new job is 100% remote during this pandemic. My previous job had... various compromises... to deal with the fact that it is for the most part not the kind of thing that can be done remotely, some better than others. but I am still amazed we made it all the way to the end of 2020 without me or any of my co-workers getting the plague.

(plenty of people who had my same job did. people who had my same job and worked in the same building did).

Other neat things about this job:

It's the first time I can genuinely claim I was hired for my skills rather than because of blatant nepotism. I was certainly qualified for my previous job, because approximately every literate person is; I was even, I think, reasonably good at it, and I brought some useful skills to it my co-workers lacked; I was more or less the entirety of our IT department for most of my time there. Yet if I'd had none of that comparative advantage I would still have gotten the job on account of who I am related to, and it's nice to know I am employable without that.

I am pretty sure being obviously trans did not count against me in the hiring process. (the alternate hypotheses "I am so obviously great they just had to have me" and "they somehow failed to notice" seem, uh, unlikely)

Related to the above nepotism thing, I am every once in a while vividly aware of the extent to which multiple members of my family working at the same place means various possible negative economic downturns are correlated, in a way that means we might be unable to offer mutual support because e.g. we all lost our jobs at the same time. But now at least my edge of that correlation is broken!

I don't have a hormonal cycle, that would imply it has any regularity, but I do experience my hormonal levels going up and down (when I for some reason or another stop taking my meds and then start again) and what I am guessing is mental correlates thereof. I'm crying a lot more easily lately and there seems to be fairly consistent pattern of this happening soon after (re)starting HRT.

Anecdotally people who are on weekly estrogen injections do seem to get hormonal cycles, which I think is one more reason to explore that possibility.

as an aside re: previous post: I always feel uncomfortable talking out loud about accomplishments doing things with computers.

because, while I am in fact better with computers than the average person, even the average person who grew up with internet access, I am also substantially worse at them than a good chunk of the people reading my posts. Saying I accomplished something is almost bragging, y'know, and I know there's a good chance that everything I did there was a better way to do and obviously I am inviting social retribution by claiming to be good at a thing I'm not, in fact, good at.

This is a bad instinct but I still have it and I have to fight past it.

When I was like 15 a teacher once had an exercise where we were supposed to pick a classmate and write down one positive and one negative quality about them. He emphasised that it should not be too generic, like saying "is a good friend" or whatever, which neatly implies that the mandated criticism had to be personal (one of my classmates got an insulting nickname out of it that followed them for years).

I didn't participate in this exercise. I'd like to say it was out of moral fibre or something, but honestly most likely it's just that I was paralysed by anxiety. It didn't matter; a few people read theirs out loud but I didn't and he didn't bother to check everyone submitted one. It's not like they were graded, this was just an asshole delighting over the fact that he had authority over teenagers and could make them uncomfortable and cause them to hurt each other

I did not realise that at the time, somehow. I guess I had an ingrained habit of assuming Teachers Knew Better. I mean, I was a teenager. I'd been a child most of my school life and throughout it teachers did, often enough, know better, it's not surprising I acquired that heuristic. But I wish I had overcome it by that point, because 15-year-old me would have figured out this was just an asshole being an asshole if she'd bothered to entertain the possibility.

I wonder if this, and stuff like it, is part of why I acquired such a visceral distrust of the idea of... "Let's go around a circle and say something nice about the person to the left", "let's say three things about ourselves", whatever. Reach inside yourself and make public your private thoughts, not as a response to context, not because you decided you trust the person in front of you, just because we said everyone's gotta.

Or maybe I'm just an anxious person and this would bother me anyway even absent the specific bad experiences I've had with that, and indeed my being anxious is what overwhelmingly makes such things bad experiences for me, when for some people they apparently aren't.

Regardless, the specific source of my feelings on this is not really relevant. I was just reminded that it's a thing people do and it's bad and I hope the next time someone tries to rope me into one I am in the right mental state to be able to say "no, not gonna do that".